


Will and Fritz's Excellent Adventure

by Bobcatmoran



Category: The Tripods - John Christopher
Genre: Gen, POV First Person, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 11:14:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8888722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bobcatmoran/pseuds/Bobcatmoran
Summary: On their road trip through Eastern Europe and Asia, Will and Fritz learn a little about each other.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [idleflower](https://archiveofourown.org/users/idleflower/gifts).



We were travelling down a road someplace in Kosova. I could not have told you where, exactly, and we only had any idea of the name of the country because that was what the locals had told us. Fritz and I were now well beyond the area that anyone in the White Mountains had been able to give us any personal foreknowledge of.

Before we left, Julius had gone over an ancient map with us, a picture of the whole world, showing us the general route that we were to take. The scale, however, had been such that the country that had been where the White Mountains were — Switzerland, they called it — could be covered by the tip of my little finger, and I couldn’t recall seeing a “Kosova” on there anywhere. Fritz reckoned that it may have been “Yugoslavia,” only the natives called it by a different name. “Like how you call ‘Deutschland’ ‘Germany,’” he said.

“Why do you suppose that is?” I asked. “That different languages would have different names for some places?”

“Maybe it is because in some languages, they cannot make the sounds right, cannot even hear when they don’t have it right, so they write down what it sounds like to them, and then someone reads what is written down, mispronounces that, and so on.”

“We used to play a game like that called Whisper Down the Lane when I was a child,” I said. “You’d start out with ‘The dog has fleas’ and at the end of the line you’d get ‘The hog eats cheese.’ But someone would have to really mess up somewhere to get ‘Germany’ out of ‘Deutschland’ or ‘Kosova’ out of ‘Yugoslavia.’”

Fritz shrugged. “Who knows? It could have been some quirk of the Ancients.”

“Maybe whoever it was that first wrote down the name had a heavy accent. Like, you met Rob, right? He speaks English, but there are times that he may as well be speaking Hungarian.”

“His native language is English?” Fritz asked, frowning. “I thought he told me that he spoke Scots.”

“No, it’s English,” I said, quite certain of this. “He was one of the only ones I could talk to when we first got here, aside from Henry and Beanpole.”

“I was so jealous of you when you, Henry, and Jean-Paul first arrived,” Fritz said.

“You? Jealous of me? But you’re so…together,” I said. “I was jealous of you, truth be told. You seemed so mature, so able to simply adapt to whatever happened.”

“So able to stay on the boat for an entire journey?”

“That was one time,” I said.

“Ah, but on your journey to the White Mountains, you had travelling companions, someone who had shared your experiences on the way. You even had a cousin from your home village. I had travelled alone, with no one to share my journey with, and when I got to the White Mountains, no one there had ever even heard of the town where I was born and grew up.”

“What about Hans?” I asked. “He’s German, isn’t he?”

“He’s Bavarian,” Fritz said, with unusual vehemence. “I could barely even understand him the first time I met him, his accent is so thick. Besides, he is old, and all he ever wants to talk about it how it used to be in the White Mountains, and how he doesn’t like having all these ‘children’ around.”

“That certainly is true,” I said. “I don’t understand how he could have been happier when the community was just barely surviving, shrinking every year, hiding away and aloof while the Tripods roamed free.”

“It was what he knew, and the uncertainty of change can be frightening.” Fritz said. “He’s certainly not alone in his opinions. There’s many of the old-timers who don’t like Julius’s plans. I, myself, do not think his plans are without fault.”

“You do?” Fritz had always been one of Julius’s star pupils, so far as the rebellion against the Tripods went.

“I do. But they are the best that we have, and, I believe, the best hope for humanity. I would rather be free than be safe, and would wish that freedom for everyone else as well.”

“As would I.”

* * *

 

Later that night, we decided to camp out under the stars, as the night was warm and dry, and we did not as of yet know how far our coins would have to stretch on the journey to come.

Fritz poked with a stick at the potatoes we had roasting in the embers of our dying fire. “Nearly ready,” he said, as I returned from refilling our canteens from a nearby stream. He murmured thanks as I handed him a canteen, then took a swig.

I laid down on the ground, bedroll pillowed beneath my head, and looked up at the sky. “Fritz?”

“Yes, Will?”

“Did you ever pretend to see pictures in the stars as a child?”

“I can’t say that I have. My brothers and sisters and I, we would look at the clouds, though, and point out what they looked like. My youngest brother, he wanted a dog so badly, that was all he’d ever see. Dogs everywhere. We’d all be saying, ‘Oh, it’s a snake! Oh, that one looks like Old Herr Braun!’ No. It was a dog, he’d say.”

I laughed. “Do you know where your brothers and sisters are now?”

“Most of them were from my father’s first wife and were several years older. They’re all married now. My oldest sister was going to have her first child when I left home. My youngest brother and I have the same mother. He’s probably started his apprenticeship by now. Hopefully he didn’t end up under the same woodcarver I had as master. That man…” Fritz drifted off and shook his head.

“Is that why you left?”

“Part of it. Part of it, too, was watching my brothers and sisters get Capped. It was as though they were still themselves, but not. They lost their curiosity about the world. One of my sisters, she was fascinated by insects, collected them in jars to study them. She was Capped, and suddenly she threw out her entire collection, saying it was childish and disgusting.”

“I wonder if that’s one of the things the Caps target — any curiosity about how the world works. Beanpole was telling me before we left that the Ancients somehow knew that each star was another sun, and that our own sun is actually a ball of fire so hot that it’s thousands of thousands of miles away, yet we can still feel its warmth here. How did they figure out such things?”

“How does the fire get so hot?”

“I don’t know. He tried to explain it to me, but it was all about little tiny bits of…of stuff, crashing into each other to make more stuff, and that somehow makes fire? Or heat? I didn’t really follow what he was talking about, but given all that we’ve learned about the Ancients so far, and what we saw in the Masters’ City, I wouldn’t be surprised that such a thing was possible.”

“Hm,” Fritz said, lying back on his own bedroll. He looked up at the stars, then said, “Will, look right there, at those seven stars. Don’t they look a bit like a plow?”

I looked up at where he was pointing.

“See, the handle is those three stars there, and the four stars down there are the moldboard and share.”

I squinted. “It looks more like a wagon to me.”

“A wagon?”

“Yes, see, the three stars in a line are the shaft, and the bed is the other part.”

“Where are the wheels?”

“Um,” I said, not ready to admit to this flaw in my design. “Look, at least I’m not saying it’s a dog.”

Fritz snorted, about as close as I’d ever heard him come to laughing out loud. “Come on, Will. I think the potatoes are done.”

**Author's Note:**

> There is some debate in the linguistics community as to whether Scots is a separate language from English or a dialect. 
> 
> Given when the books were published, I’m guessing that Will and Fritz were working off of a mid-20th century world political map, from well before former Yugoslavia broke up. Kosova is how you say Kosovo in Albanian, the dominant language of the country.
> 
> The constellation known as the Big Dipper in the US is known as The Plough or variations on a wagon theme across Europe.


End file.
